Geeky cultural references

Yesterday Moomin tried to explain the joke from Knights of the Dinner Table, a comic book about a group of people in a role-playing game, to my mom. “And then he says, ‘I waste him with my crossbow…’ and that’s funny, because…” is the only bit I overheard.

I didn’t even know that Moomin had been reading KODT! I’m so pleased! He has not played a lot of role-playing games himself yet, but he’s been around ours ever since he was born. He must think it is totally normal for a bunch of grown-ups to sit around in the living room saying things like “I go for him with an axe while you cast your sleep spell” and rolling dice. That’s got to be weird. In one of his favorite games, we borrowed his dragons and godzilla monsters as our “miniatures” to play out an enormous battle from a Korea-in-1864 “His Majesty’s Dragon” game.

I’m not sure if anyone reading this will get the joke about the crossbow but it has to do with a character from the comic book who is sort of a dork. His role-playing character doesn’t have a lot of depth or character, and when his party encounters anything at all, he tends to respond by trying to kill it. So actually it’s something nerdy that I say in random situations. If I’m in a business meeting or running into a hard technical problem I might totally mutter “I waste it with my crossbow” meaning that the idiotic beavis-and-butthead part of me has an ignoble impulse to just stand back and shoot whatever it is, treating it as a hack and slash approach to a Wandering Monster rolled up from the Random Encounter Table, instead of properly dealing like a grownup with a complex situation. I’m not sure if Moomin even gets the whole joke, but maybe. I consider how much I liked to sing “National Brotherhood Week” when I was 5, and figure he will find it funny for his own reasons, and fill in the gaps later.